The Dilemma

The Democratic Party has spent so much time politicising the Iraq War, they find themselves in a bit of a quandary. General Petreaeus, the coalition commander in Iraq, is due to report to Congress, next week, on the progress of the reinforcement strategy in the conflict. It is expected that there will be good news and bad news.
The good news will most likely be that the "surge" is working; Anbar Province, an Al Qaeda stronghold less than six months ago, is nearly cleansed of the insurgents, the Iraqi military is stepping up and is more able to carry out operations on their own, and violence in Baghdad has declined over the last six months.
This good news is bad news for the Democratic Majority in Congress, and they are already planning ways to spin it, as pointed out by Libertarian radio personality Neal Boortz.
Boortz reports that, if there is good news, the Democrats will spin it as being "Bush's report," and therefore compromised. They will embrace and emphasize the bad news--that the Iraqi Government isn't meeting its benchmarks--using it as an excuse to surrender. There are other Democratic members of Congress who will say success means we can pull out of Iraq, now.
The sad part is that many of these politicians understand the need for success in Iraq, but they have dug themselves into a hole filled with denial and ignorance. If they don't understand the need for success, they haven't been listening to Al Qaeda leaders who have said that Iraq is the main battleground for Al Qaeda. They do not understand that victory over Al Qaeda in Iraq is important, not just to Iraq and America, but to the entire region.
Michael Ledeen, the author of The Iranian Timebomb, points out in his book, and explains in his blog, that the dangerous and deadly Iranian Supreme Council can be overthrown from within Iran, much like what happened in the Soviet Union, unless we fail in Iraq. Failure in Iraq will be touted as a victory by the Iranian mullahs, and regime change there will be much harder. If a regime change without war can be effected in Iran, it will prevent a future war over Iran's nuclear weapons, and, possibly, nuclear conflict between Israel and Iran.
Success in Iraq is important, because it will show the people of Iran that they can trust the Americans for help, rather than seeing us as cowards and quitters, as the mullahs characterize us.
But the Democratic politicians won't acknowledge this. Nor will they acknowledge that, if the US leaves Iraq prematurely, that there will be millions of Iraqis killed, that there will likely be a much more widespread war in the region involving Iran and Saudi Arabia five to ten years down the road, and that the entire world would be cut off from the oil resources of the region.
The Democrats know that history will hold them responsible for the disaster, which is part of the dilemma they face. They cannot answer such questions as "how will we react to the Iraqi genocide," or "how will Western civilization survive without Middle Eastern Oil," or, even, "how do we prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb?"
Like it or not, the future of the world depends on what happens in Iraq. Everything is tied to that conflict. It is time that Congress should stop politicising the war and get on with the issues they really need to work on. Otherwise they can only dig their way in deeper.